Free A Demon in My View by Ruth Rendell Page B

about Anthony’s thesis, taking up much the same attitude to it as he would have done had he learned Anthony was writing a thriller.
    “There’s a study for you,” he said as they drove past the cemetery. “You could use that in your writing. Twenty-five years ago last month that’s where the Kenbourne Killer strangled his first victim. Maureen Cowan, she was called.”
    “What, in the cemetery?”
    “No, in the path that runs along the back of it. A lot of people use that path as a short cut from the Hospital Arms to Elm Green station. She was a tart, soliciting down there. Mind you, I was only a kid at the time, but I remember it all right.”
    “Kid?” said Jonathan. “You mean you’re
kidding
. You were thirteen.”
    Brian looked hurt but he made no response. “They never caught the chap. He struck again”—he employed the journalese quite unconsciously as if it were standard usage—“five years later. That time it was a student nurse called Bridget Something. Irish girl. He strangled her on a bit of open ground between the hospital and the railway bridge. Now would he be a psychopath, Tony?”
    “I suppose so. Was it the same man both times?”
    “The cops thought so. But there were never any more murders—not unsolved ones, I mean. Now why, Tony, would you say that was?”
    “Moved out of the district,” said Anthony, who was getting bored. “Or died,” he added, for he had been less than a year old when that first murder was committed.
    “Could have been in prison for something else,” said Brian. “Could have been in a mental home. I’ve often wondered about that and whether he’ll ever come back and strike again.” He parked the car outside Jonathan’s new home. “What a dump! You could still change your mind, Jon old man. Move in with Vesta and me for a bit. Have our couch.”
    “Christ,” said Jonathan. “There’s one born every minute.” He delivered this platitude as if it were a quotation, as perhaps, Anthony thought, it was.
    They invited him to accompany them to the Grand Duke for an evening’s drinking, but Anthony refused. It was nearly five. He went home and read J. G. Miller’s doctoral dissertation: “Eyeblink Conditioning of Primary and Neurotic Psychopaths,” remembering at ten to put his clock and his watch back. It was the end of British Summertime.
       Watching from his eyrie, his living-room window, Arthur saw the new tenant of Room 3 arrive on Sunday afternoon. At first he thought this must be some visitor, a disreputable friend perhaps of Li-li’s or Anthony Johnson’s, for he couldn’t recollect any previous tenant having arrived in such style. The man was as black as the taxi from which he alighted, and not only black of skin and hair. He wore a black leather coat which, even from that distance, Arthur could see had cost a lot of money, and he carried two huge black leather suitcases. To Arthur’s horrified eyes, he resembled some Haitian gangster-cum-political bigwig. He had seen such characters on television and he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that a couple of revolvers and a knife were concealed under that flashy coat.
    Staying here obviously, but as whose guest? Arthur put his own front door on the latch and listened. The house door closedquietly, footsteps crossed the hall, mounted the stairs. He peeped out in time to see a sepia-coloured hand adorned with a plain gold signet ring insert a key in the lock of Room 3. He was incensed. Once again Stanley Caspian hadn’t bothered to tell him he’d let a room. Once again he had been slighted. For two pins he’d write a strongly-worded letter to Stanley, complaining of ill-usage. But what would be the use? Stanley would only say Arthur hadn’t given him the chance to tell him, and it was vain to grumble about the new man’s colour with this Race Relations Act restricting landlords the way it did.
    On Tuesday Arthur learned his name. He took in the letters, a whole heap of them this